China: A Specter Is Haunting Communism
Clark, Joseph
It's almost as though an "iron law" operates in all the communist countries, varied though they are. They seem haunted by the specter of democracy, especially when they seek to reform their...
...IT MAY BE DIFFICULT TO discern latter-day Chinese Communism in the doctrines that Li Ta-chao and Ch'en Tu-hsiu espoused in the early days...
...The revolution that finally swept China after World War II had its origins in the May 4th movement named for demonstrations in 1919 by Peking students protesting the Japanese seizure of Shantung province...
...But there is every indication that the Chinese Communist leadership is steering clear of anything resembling Mao Tsetung's madness...
...in many cases the Shanghai workers managed to throw the Red Guards out of the factories...
...The demonstration on May 4, 1919, at the Gate of Heavenly Peace was followed by the organization of a student union to fight for China's national emancipation...
...Professors Ch'en and Li, the latter Mao's inspiration, carried a host of students into the revolutionary movement as reconstructed by Marxism-Leninism...
...Benjamin I. Schwartz, Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951...
...Chinese students abroad, such as Chou En-lai in Paris, returned to participate in this new aspect of the Chinese revolution...
...Students and soldiers had organized a succession of revolutionary study societies in Hupei, the better to plot a rising...
...These included Bertrand Russell from England and John Dewey from the U.S...
...Just a short time after the Bolsheviks took power, Li greeted "The Victory of Bolshevism," proclaiming: "Henceforth all national boundaries, all differences of classes, all barriers to freedom will be swept away...
...Asked whether he favored "bourgeois" or "socialist" democracy, Soares replied: "There is democracy, period...
...No great democratic transformation is signaled by such a modest reform...
...Sun Yat-sen, who became the leader of the revolution that overthrew the monarchy in 1911, was a long-time student who had almost all his credits for a medical degree...
...The Chinese peasants got back the land they tilled...
...Professor Ch'en started in politics as an advocate of democracy and science...
...For such heresies Bukharin lost his life...
...But they faced an obvious disadvantage —the history of Western imperialism in the Far East Finally, when the Paris peace conference endorsed self-determination of nations in 1919 the Chinese discovered that this did not include their vast country...
...The obvious advantage that the Communist International had in China over social democracy is that the Comintern put the national independence struggles at the heart of the battles being fought in the Far East...
...There's a long tradition that feeds into the demonstrations that swept China's universities this past December...
...And perhaps in Russia Gorbachev will be more successful than Khrushchev in maintaining the momentum of reform and relaxation, but not removal, of the dictatorship...
...Many people have been concerned about elections, and this year, election methods at the county level will be further improved, 146 including nominating more candidates for election than required for each post...
...Notes John K. Fairbank, Edwin 0. Reischauer, Albert M. Craig, East Asia—Tradition and Transformation (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1978...
...There is little likelihood of a mad reaction such as Mao's "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution...
...It is of the people, for the people, and by the people, and it is not the dictatorship of the proletariat...
...Comes the promise of democracy and freedom, which usually accompanies reform, and it runs into a Great Wall, euphemistically called "the leading role of the Party...
...It took only the advice of the emissary from Moscow, Gregory Voitinsky, who arrived in June 1920, to organize the first Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in July 1921...
...When Nikolai Bukharin is rehabilitated and at least some of the guilty prosecuted, we'll know a really profound change has occurred...
...The enormous student demonstrations that spread through China this past December were in many ways a logical outcome of the reforms enacted since the death of Mao...
...In many ways it is the most revolutionary doctrine in the world today...
...In his brilliant study of the Chinese Communist revolution, Benjamin I. Schwartz describes the May 4th movement when "the fires of nationalism smoldering among China's student elements finally burst into flame...
...There has, for example, been considerable interest in doctrines that many thought were superseded after communism conquered China...
...Observers have noted that despite the isolation of China from the rest of the world, intellectuals and many students managed to acquire a remarkable fund of information and knowledge both of history and what was 147 happening in the world...
...with a nationalist revolution sweeping China's students and soldiers (and finally its peasants) he moved rapidly to bolshevism...
...It was no accident, as the Communists might say, that the universities were a primary target of Mao's effort to make a permanent revolution...
...But recent history suggests it remains the wave of the future...
...It suffered a setback in China after the suppression of "Democracy's Wall," and again this past January when the Chinese students were barred from further demonstrations...
...Perhaps, though, the current crackdown in China is different from those that have gone before...
...Democracy is outstanding among these doctrines that have acquired new meaning for Chinese students and intellectuals...
...But when Hu continued as a member of the Politburo, observers were struck by the contrast with previous purges...
...Even before the party was founded at a congress of twelve men in Shanghai, Ch'en and Li had hailed the Russian Bolshevik revolution...
...Perhaps the clearest statement of this outlook was expressed by the Portuguese Socialist leader, Mario Soares...
...When proletarians did participate, as in Shanghai, they fought back against the Red Guards who tried to "storm" the factories...
...At this writing Chinese Communism is in the "crackdown" phase of the cycle...
...It may be a long, long time before democracy in that sense prevails in China or in any communist country...
...These two giants seem to be jockeying for position in a race that features many starts toward reform and relaxation of authoritarian controls, and then ends up with jittery but stern reactions of an alarmed dictatorship...
...At least as much, the student demonstrations have behind them a long and vital indigenous tradition, going back to Chinese nationalism early in this century and then both expressed through and manipulated by the early Chinese Communist movement...
...foreign investment and greater trade and intercourse with the capitalist world were promoted...
...The "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" was "great" only in the sense that it cut a tremendous swath into the body of China...
...A crackdown ensues, as has happened time and again in the Soviet Union and China...
...Premier Zhao Ziyang, at least temporarily in the general secretary post, promised a Chinese New Year gathering there would be no large-scale purge, that the economic reforms would continue...
...The removal of party General Secretary Hu Yaobang, protégé of Deng and supporter of economic reform and extension of liberty, was a sign of how serious the crackdown was...
...Another who became a founder was a student from Hunan, Mao Tse-tung, who organized a study group in Changsha in March 1919...
...When they come pouring out of the camps and prisons and psychiatric institutions, when dissent becomes normal and not a crime, when people can choose to stay or to leave, hopes will indeed be raised...
...who came to China for extended periods of teaching and lecturing...
...He went a bit further: The Chinese Communist party has not only proposed and led the economic structural reform, but also set forward, at an appropriate time, the task of political structural reform...
...It was not proletarian since its main activists were bands of "Red Guard" school youths wandering around the country terrorizing, first the universities and then party headquarters...
...When the monarchy lost Heaven's mandate in 1911 it was students and soldiers who were the driving force of the revolution...
...Curiously, a good part of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in Russia, sponsored by Lenin in the early 1920s and championed by Bukharin, has been instituted in China under Deng Xiaoping...
...If anything, it was a counterrevolution...
...some freedom was granted to the arts and sciences...
...The students of the May 4th movement and the demonstrators at Heavenly Square and the creators of "Democracy's Wall" in China have just that view of democracy...
...Twenty years ago in China when Mao Tse-tung called upon "a hundred flowers to bloom" and when Chinese intellectuals obeyed his encouraging appeal for diversity, they suffered terrible retribution just weeks later...
...Democracy's Wall" became a symbol of the widespread concern and demand for democracy in the unadulterated Lincolnesque sense of the word...
...Cultural it certainly was not, since its targets were both the ancient and the new in Chinese culture, with many priceless objects of art destroyed...
...There were Western intellectuals who did exercise some influence when they May 4th movement was spreading...
...small private enterprise was encouraged in cities and villages...
...2 The two founders of the Chinese Communist party, Li Ta-chao and Ch'en Tu-hsiu, were professors at Peking University, Ch'en the head of the literature department and Li in philosophy...
...They seem haunted by the specter of democracy, especially when they seek to reform their moribund economies...
...These reforms are remarkably similar to those urged by Bukharin in Russia more than sixty years ago, when he went so far as to tell the Russian peasants to "enrich themselves...
...But the sequence of events in the period of reform instituted by Deng Xiaoping seems quite different, despite the disappointing crackdown on the Chinese students and intellectuals...
...Their economic growth and individual well-being are held back by the fetters of ancient dogmas, such as highly centralized command economies, lack of material incentives, and curbs on individual initiative and choice...
Vol. 34 • April 1987 • No. 2
